Jack and Joe

by Diane Capri

  “That’s gotta make her popular at the Officer’s Club,” Gaspar said, munching and sipping. “Increases the suspect pool.”

  “Actually, she built solid cases and then she took them up the chain of command and then the Army handled them—out of the spotlight, which the top brass did appreciate, believe me. They don’t like reading about their dirty laundry in the New York Times and the Washington Post and having it beamed across the world to our enemies.” He crossed his long legs and leaned back, open and easygoing. “But, sure, the ones who were prosecuted weren’t happy. Neither were their friends. She made enemies. Powerful ones.”

  I leaned forward. “So she was working on a corruption case when she died. Same as most days. You’re suggesting someone killed her for that?” What he said rang true. There must have been a connection, but it was hard to see what that relationship might be. “And why would Reacher care about corruption in the Army now? He’s been out of that life for fifteen years.”

  “The important thing for you to know is that Cooper believes Reacher cares. Probably because of Summer. Reacher has a tendency to be protective of his friends and deadly to his enemies.” Finlay looped one leg over the other and kicked back. I’ve seen men discussing weekend sports get a lot more agitated than Finlay discussing murder and mayhem. Might have been an act, but my gut said he was exactly as calm as he appeared.

  Gaspar said, “You sound like you’ve got firsthand knowledge. What are you to Reacher? Friend or enemy?”

  Finlay ignored him. To me, he said, “Cooper thought you’d find Reacher. That’s why he sent you to Fort Bird. So you could sniff Reacher out.”

  Yeah, tell me something I don’t know. The tension in my neck and shoulders made it hard to move my head. “And this interests you because?”

  Gaspar had refilled his coffee. “Because Finlay doesn’t want Cooper to find Reacher before he does. Plain as the nose on his face.”

  I shook my head. “That’s not quite right, is it, Finlay? You’d rather Reacher wasn’t found at all, I’m guessing.”

  Finlay revealed his teeth, but the expression wasn’t a smile. Not even remotely. “My reasons are my own. All you need to know is that Cooper’s using you. And it could get you killed.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s old news, too,” Gaspar assured him.

  “You’re worried, aren’t you?” I stood and faced Finlay. “If Cooper wants us to flush Reacher out, which we all suspect is exactly what he wants, then you want the same thing. Only you want to get to Reacher first.”

  “Not quite.” Finlay shook his head slightly. “I’d be fine with Reacher staying off the grid for the rest of his life. But I don’t want Cooper to find him.”

  “Why do you care?” Gaspar asked.

  “The sniper who killed Summer had to be military trained. Probably Army or Marines. Reacher has both types of training. Garden variety snipers couldn’t have done it. The circumstances of that shoot were not impossible, but well beyond merely difficult. He pulled it off.” He paused and bent his head in a brief, single nod. “Be afraid, Otto. If you won’t trust me to help you, fear is the only thing that might keep you alive.”

  He’d confirmed one thing for sure. Any of the more than a million active and inactive Army co-workers could have had reasons to want Eunice Summer dead. A twenty-five-year career chasing Army crimes would have put a target on her back many times over. Narrowing the suspect pool would be a challenge for an entire task force. Gaspar and I would never manage it if we used conventional techniques.

  Finlay stood and shot the stiff cuffs of his white shirt. Gleaming gold cufflinks caught the light. He smoothed his tie over his plank-flat stomach and buttoned his jacket.

  “This is a two-bedroom suite,” he said. “It’s yours for the night. Order dinner. Get some sleep. Think about what I’ve said.”

  After he had left, Gaspar picked up the room service menu. He grinned. “This is a lot nicer than ordering stale sandwiches from the truck stop delivered to the New Haven Grand Lodge by an exotic dancer.”

  I swiped a room key off the table. “Let’s go get your pajamas.”

  On the way back from the car, I used my personal cell phone to dial Sheriff Randy Taylor and arranged to meet him at the morgue tomorrow. I wanted to see Summer’s body for myself and I didn’t care who knew I was coming.

  CHAPTER 23

  The suite at the Four Seasons was more than a few classes up from the New Haven Grand Lodge, for sure. Each bedroom was larger than my apartment and furnished with a king bed and a desk. The only downside was the near certainty that the Boss could see and hear everything that went on inside.

  Unless of course Finlay had disabled the security and probably his own while he was here. He might have returned all systems to normal by now.

  Either way, the safe assumption was that anything we said or did here would be like simultaneously broadcasting on television, radio, and the Internet.

  But then, both Finlay and Cooper already knew more than we did about whatever was going on here, so unless we came up with something remarkable, in theory, there was nothing to worry about.

  Neither of us was dressed for the Four Seasons’ dining room, so we ordered room service off the menu. While we waited for delivery, I unpacked and washed off the road grime in a shower large enough for a party. Afterward, I felt almost human again.

  A doorbell chimed. Gaspar was talking on the phone in his room, probably to Marie, so I answered it. Room service delivered and set up and left and never asked me to sign anything. Finlay’s doing, I imagined. The paperwork would never show we were here.

  While I waited for Gaspar, I set up my laptop and connected to the secure satellite. Nothing pending from the Boss. Which might be okay if he hadn’t seen the Summer autopsy report yet. If he had seen the report, then failing to send it to us was not okay at all.

  I wrote up my notes for the results of our assignment so far and uploaded them to my secure personal server along with a copy of the autopsy report. Paying my insurance premium, I call it. Just in case something goes wrong down the line. My gut said that day was coming. I could feel it the way an arthritic feels a coming storm.

  Gaspar was still on the phone and my stomach was growling. To distract myself and simply for practice, I checked the suite for electronic eavesdropping equipment. Which was when I noticed another flat manila envelope. This one was resting on the chair Finlay had occupied earlier. Had he left it there?

  It had my name on the front in the now familiar printing. Still flat, but a bit heftier than the last one. I found a butter knife to slit the bottom seal open.

  Inside were several photographs. I turned the envelope upside down and poured eight eight-by-ten photos onto my bed. Using a tissue, I arranged them in what seemed like chronological order.

  I was still studying them when Gaspar finished his call and yelled from the other room, “Aren’t you hungry?”

  When I didn’t answer, he came through the open doorway. “What do you have there?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Gaspar joined me at the side of the bed and we both stared down at the photos.

  Six of the photos were stills from a closed-circuit video system. The poor quality of the images suggested older equipment. There was no date or time stamp. The seventh photo was an outdoor shot of a residential neighborhood. The eighth was a crime scene.

  Each of the first six images was a man and a woman. The man was huge. The woman was petite.

  In the first photo, the scene was a hotel lobby. The man and woman faced the registration desk. Both were dressed in BDUs. The clerk was totally obscured by the man’s oversized body, which probably meant the clerk was female. A sign behind and above the desk clerk’s head said “Georges V.”

  The second photo was the man and woman coming out of the elevator. She must have been talking because his head was bent as if to hear her. His face was obscured. Hers was clear enough to recognize. Eunice Summer. I imagined the colors, copper behind th
e deep mahogany of her skin, coal-black eyes, and delicate jaw. She was beautiful and young. Maybe about twenty-five years old.

  The third photo was the pair walking into the hotel through the front entrance. A man with a top hat held the door open. Each carried a Samaritaine shopping bag, presumably filled with the BDUs because now they wore civilian clothes. Black shoes, black pencil skirt, gray and white sweater, and a gray wool jacket for her. He’d donned jeans, a light blue sweatshirt, and a black bomber jacket. He was still wearing his Army boots, presumably because he couldn’t find shoes large enough. Both wore jaunty berets. Again, his head was tilted down as if to hear her words and his face was obscured.

  I studied the fourth photo for a while. They were exiting the elevator again. They wore smiles and the civilian clothes, minus the berets. This time, both faces were identifiable. Summer’s companion was Jack Reacher. No question. Travel documents could confirm, if we needed confirmation.

  Aside from his formal Army headshot and some grainy outdoor video, this was the first time I’d seen a full frontal image. He was handsome in a rugged, weathered way. Fair hair was cut short in the Army style. Blue eyes with a few squint lines at the corners like he’d spent a lot of time outdoors in the sunshine.

  He carried himself squared away, like the model for a child’s action figure doll. Tall, broad-shouldered, well-muscled. Huge hands and feet. Overall, he looked young and happy and world-weary, all at the same time.

  The fifth photo was the pair returning to the hotel again. The man with the top hat held the door. Reacher and Summer held hands. Hers was invisible inside his giant paw.

  The sixth photo was the one paparazzi would call the money shot. It was edited from video captured by a corridor camera.

  Reacher was standing just inside the open door to her room, still wearing the jeans and a blue sweatshirt. Barefoot. Summer was dressed in her civilian clothes, too. They were kissing. The kind of kissing that usually led to a lot more intimate contact. In an old-fashioned movie, this would be the part where he’d kick the door closed, leaving us to imagine the rest. Not that much imagination was required.

  So Reacher and Summer were lovers. Together in Paris. Doing the quick math in my head, it had to have been around the same time Josephine Reacher died.

  The last two photos were completely different. Different time, different place, different camera. Different subjects, too. Jarringly so.

  The seventh photo was of a dead man seated on a kitchen floor, legs straight out, arms to his sides, hands resting on the floor, with a gunshot wound through the center of his forehead. Gray hair parted and combed to the side and a little too long around his ears. Steel-rimmed eyeglasses magnified his eyes, which were wide open as if he’d been well and truly shocked to see the bullet coming. Unlike the others, this photo had a date and military time stamp. 13-1-90. 1932.

  The eighth and last photo was the backyard of a house on a residential street after dark. A single streetlight in the alley provided weak yellow illumination. The yard was messy. An old barbecue grill had been tossed on the ground in the middle of what might once have been a lawn. A big man wearing woodland-patterned BDUs and boots was in the process of walking out the back door when the photo was taken. The date and time stamp was 13-1-90. 1934.

  “Where did these come from?” Gaspar asked after a while.

  “I found another envelope in Finlay’s chair, but I didn’t see it until after the room service guy left.” My stomach growled loud enough to be heard all the way to Paris. I grabbed my phone and took pictures of the photos and sent them to my personal server.

  “Let’s eat.” Gaspar walked toward the sitting room. “We can talk at the same time. The Boss and Finlay already know all of this, so if you missed any bugs during your search of the rooms earlier, they wouldn’t hear anything new.”

  Our food had been sent up inside one of those carts that keeps everything warm until you’re ready and then it opens into a table. Gaspar pulled the plates out and I poured the water. I handed him the wine bottle and the corkscrew.

  Once we were sorted, I said, “So Reacher and Summer-the-sanctimonious-bulldog had an affair, maybe on Uncle Sam’s dime, and General Clifton and Joe probably knew about it. Who else knew?”

  Gaspar chewed his steak like a man just released from indenture. “Maybe no one. At least, not back then. Because Reacher was Summer’s CO, too. The Army still takes a dim view of that kind of fraternizing.”

  “Looks like they were already in all kinds of deep shit, though. I mean, what kind of Army grunt can afford to stay at the Georges V? That’s the place Princess Diana stayed. Royalty and business tycoons and wealthy oil sheiks sleep there. Hell, two nights in that place and you’d have to mortgage all five of your kids to pay the bill, Chico.”

  Gaspar grinned. “A little bit like either of us trying to pay for this suite, eh?”

  “It explains why the Boss thought Reacher might show up at Fort Bird, though. I mean, Summer was supposed to be there to tell me all about it, remember?”

  “It was a one-night stand, Suzy Wong. Not Casablanca. He wouldn’t care if we found out about the whole thing after all this time.” Gaspar cut off another chunk of the steak and stuck it in his mouth. “Didn’t she tell you she hadn’t seen Reacher in twenty years? Kind of suggests he never saw her again after he left Fort Bird, anyway.”

  “Yeah, well, by all accounts they weren’t sleeping together in the most expensive hotel in Paris, either.” I’d been pushing my food around on the plate, but that wasn’t helping my grouchy stomach. So I ate. The veal piccata was excellent, if a little cold.

  “Drink some more wine.” He grinned and refilled my glass. What he meant was that I should chill out. These photos were decades old. Summer was dead and Reacher was, well, not around. So far. How could their affair and who funded it possibly matter now?

  Which was exactly the problem. The affair shouldn’t have mattered. But somehow, it did. Mattered enough that Finlay left that envelope with the photos in it. Or the Boss sent them up with the room service guy. Or someone else made sure we found them. Either way, the clear message was that the old affair was important.

  I played with the veal and capers and thought about why that might be.

  The only motive that made sense was blackmail. Summer had spent her career ferreting out corruption. Yet she’d been AWOL at the Army’s expense in Paris while sleeping with her commanding officer. How much more against the rules could her behavior have possibly been?

  If this evidence of criminal and ethical misbehavior was made public now, she’d have been reprimanded, at the very least. She might even have been busted back, the way Reacher had been. Conduct unbecoming and all of that. Given the Army’s constant force reductions, she might have been encouraged to retire, too. Maybe she’d have paid to keep the truth under wraps. The blackmailer might have tried Reacher, too, assuming he could find Reacher. But Reacher had nothing to lose and Summer had everything to lose. She was the logical target.

  The only problem with the blackmail theory was that it’s impossible to blackmail a dead woman.

  Which meant sending us the photos now, when Summer was already dead, had to be motivated by something else entirely.

  CHAPTER 24

  We took a nonstop from Dallas to Raleigh the next morning and collected another Crown Vic at the airport that Gaspar had somehow acquired. With Gaspar behind the wheel, we traveled the Interstate south this time. The same route Summer would have taken on the day she died. Gaspar drove the speed limit, which gave me a chance to observe the terrain, had there been anything to see.

  We rode most of the distance with our own thoughts and no conversation, which was fine with me. I’ve never understood why two people alone in a car or a room necessarily had to talk to each other.

  North of the exit for New Haven, The Lucky Bar’s neon signs flashed blindingly. Which probably meant they were once again open for business.

  Gaspar said, “Do we have time to look ar
ound at the truck stop?”

  “After. I want to have plenty of time for mile marker #224.”

  The Crown Vic was cruising at the posted speed limit of seventy miles an hour when we passed the truck stop. We had been gradually gaining elevation and ten miles further along, we began our descent. The road wasn’t particularly dangerous. It wound through picturesque mountainous woodland from well before the truck stop all the way past Fort Bird.

  “Around that blind curve is the spot. Right lane.”

  At mile marker #224, the pavement curved a wide left bank and disappeared around the mountain.

  Gaspar slowed well below the minimum speed and turned on his flashers as if he was having engine problems. The incline had been gradual, but the descent was steeper. Warning signs were posted before the curve and more lined the guardrail along the big bend.

  The blind curve was perfectly safe at the posted speed limit, which was reduced to fifty miles an hour. At eighty miles an hour, it would be maybe half as safe.

  I wasn’t driving this time, which meant I could take my eyes off the road to scan the area thoroughly.

  The right side guardrail was damaged. Whether from Summer’s crash or an earlier one was impossible to say.

  After the shoulder on the far right southbound lane, the mountain fell away. Nothing but treetops filled the void. An involuntary shudder ran through me when I peered over the guardrail down the steep incline on the right.

  “So the first rig was either slowed or stopped ahead and Summer had no time to avoid the crash,” Gaspar said.

  “That’s what the report says, and how it probably unfolded based on the photo as well as the newscast videos we’ve seen.”

  “Why did the tanker in front of Summer stop along here? Anybody would recognize the danger. Semi drivers are pros. They wouldn’t create a potential safety disaster like that.”

  “He says he had already slowed due to the weather conditions. When he came around the blind curve, there were two deer crossing the road and he downshifted and braked to slow further. He said he was moving when she hit him, but not fast enough to avoid the collision.”